Download `Our Town` never left the stage, but this season`s productions are

t. charles erickson
‘Our Town’ never left the stage,
but this season’s productions are finding
sharp new angles
By Lori Ann L aster
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AMERICANTHEATRE may/june08
L
ike many Americans, I first encountered Thornton Wilder’s Our Town during my pre-teens. I was crammed into a middle school
auditorium with a couple of hundred annoyed eighth graders to watch the great American classic be performed by fellow students—including my younger sister Amy in the role of Rebecca. Dressed in a blue gingham dress, in pigtails, gazing up at the
construction-paper moon, bristling with excitation and nervousness, she called out, voice cracking: “Jane Crofut; The Crofut
Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America….Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere;
the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God—that’s what it said on the envelope.” I immediately turned to the kid next to me
and whispered, “What the hell does that mean?”
I wore dark eye makeup and had a penchant for rebellion. My
response to Wilder’s “life of a village against the life of the stars”
was to instantly dismiss it as just a sepia-toned postcard from an
insignificant turn-of-the-century New Hampshire town—a dull
portrait of laconic Yankees coming of age, falling in love, getting
married and dying. Teenage courtship over ice-cream sodas and the
provincial delight of the smell of heliotrope in the moonlight was a
little too saccharine for my tastes, despite the intrigue of a magical
Stage Manager who seemed to have the limits of time and space at his
fingertips. A decade later, in college, I grimaced when I saw the play
on the syllabus of my required English class. But when I picked up
Our Town and read it beneath the flickering light of my dorm room,
I was shocked. Was this bold, unflinchingly philosophical, intricate
look at the human condition even the same play?
This season, I’ve talked to artists at a diverse group of six theatres
across the country that are all producing Our Town—and, by virtue of
a range of innovative approaches and interpretive twists, refusing to
let audiences dismiss it as a nostalgic hymn to small-town life. This
past fall the play ran concurrently at Two River Theater Company
in Red Bank, N.J., helmed by artistic director Aaron Posner; Indiana
Repertory Theatre in Indianapolis, directed by Peter Amster; and
Connecticut’s Hartford Stage, directed by Gregory Boyd. Three
more productions follow this spring and summer: The Hypocrites of
Chicago mounts the play through June 8, directed by David Cromer;
it opens at Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre Company May 22, overseen
by artistic director Terrence J. Nolan; and Chay Yew directs the play
at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland June 4–Oct. 11.
“We’re in the dawn of this play’s golden age,” believes Tappan
Wilder, the playwright’s literary executor and nephew, as he watches
growing numbers of professional theatres rediscover the complexity
According to Tappan Wilder,
it’s widely believed that
Our Town is performed
“at least once each night
somewhere in this country.”
From left, Wynn Harmon, Joe Binder, Stephen D’Ambrose
and Erin Weaver in Our Town, directed by Aaron Posner,
at Two River Theater Company in Red Bank, N.J.
may/june08 AMERICANTHEATRE
of Our Town and the genius of its author. “Observers are finally discovering that, like an iceberg, two thirds of Thornton Wilder is under
water.” Indeed, Wilder is the only writer to win a Pulitzer Prize both
for drama (twice, for Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth) and fiction
(The Bridge of San Luis Rey), and his influence on acclaimed dramatists
who came later—Lanford Wilson, John Guare and Romulus Linney,
for starters—is profound. Yet, it’s not uncommon for the play to be
disregarded as a dusty, sentimental classic and its scribe dismissed
as a bathetic idealist.
When Our Town was first staged at the McCarter Theatre in
Princeton, N.J., in January 1938, in an otherwise negative review,
Variety remarked, “It probably represents an all-time high in experimental theatre.” When it moved to Henry Miller’s Theatre in New
York a month later, Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times,
“Our Town has escaped from the formal barrier of modern theatre.…
Under the leisurely monotone of the production there is a fragment
of the immortal truth.”
A bare stage, no props, the use of mime, breaking the fourth
wall, dismantling the unities of time and place—these were radically
innovative devices that astounded audiences at a time when kitchensink realism dominated the serious stage, and boulevard comedies and
melodrama proliferated. Influenced by his European counterparts and
the techniques of Shakespeare and the Greeks, Wilder was eager to
abandon the box sets and realistic props that were ubiquitous on the
post–World War I American stage. “I began to feel that the theatre
was not only inadequate,” wrote Wilder, “it was evasive; it did not wish
to draw upon its deeper potentialities.… It aimed to be soothing.” It
was by removing the diversion of realistic clutter and tapping into
the imagination of audiences that Wilder strove to make what was
on stage reflect the verities of life: “Our claim, our hope, our despair
are in the mind—not in things, not in scenery.”
Our Town was the vehicle Wilder used to not only eliminate the
obtrusive bric-a-brac of scenery and props but to synthesize life to
its barest elements: While projecting the façade of the specific—the
quotidian lives of two young New Englanders, Emily and George,
and their Grover’s Corners neighbors—Our Town uses its deceptively
standard three-act structure to reflect the universal cycle of life. In
the first act, “The Daily Life,” adolescent Emily and George get
schooled and grow up. The second act is “Love and Marriage,” in
which the two fall in love and are happily wed. Act 3—“I reckon you
can guess what that’s about,” muses the Stage Manager, the play’s
omnipresent guide, as the inevitability of death (and speculations
about its metaphysical consequences) move to the fore. By constructing
the play in this symbolic manner, Wilder was able to transcend the
boundaries of the play’s specific world to give his audience a glimpse
of the universal and eternal.
So how did such a pioneering and revolutionary work fade into
picturesque Americana, reminiscent of Norman Rockwell? In some
ways, the play is a victim of its own success. After its startling Broadway
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courtesy of indiana repertory theatre
The company of Indiana Repertory Theatre’s Our Town, directed by Peter Amster.
premiere, Our Town took on the patina of a beloved American classic,
and when it became available for production in 1939, with its large cast
and low budgetary demands, it exploded onto the amateur stage—the
play was reportedly performed in more than 795 communities in less
than a year. The show has also had a healthy life on the professional
stage, enjoying regular revivals both on Broadway and at high-profile
regional theatres—most recently at Connecticut’s Westport Country
Playhouse in 2002, featuring superstar Paul Newman, and Lincoln
Center Theater in 1988–89 in a Tony-winning production with actor
and raconteur Spalding Gray. There are several film and TV versions
(the first of which was produced by Sol Lesser just two years after the
play’s premiere), and it has been transformed, under the same name,
into such genres as opera, with music by Ned Rorem and libretto by
J.D. McClatchy; ballet, by noted choreographer Philip Jerry; and
a musical for television, with Frank Sinatra. According to Tappan
Wilder, it’s widely believed that Our Town is performed “at least once
each night somewhere in this country.”
Because of this, many of the artistic directors
I talked to weren’t surprised that the inclusion of Our Town in their
schedules was met with rolling eyes, accusations of playing it safe, and
the ever-popular objection, “I saw it in high school.” “People think
they know the play, but they just don’t,” contends director Boyd, who,
like his colleagues who are revisiting the play this season, is dedicated
to dispelling misgivings about its relevance and acknowledging the
nuances of its prismatic depth. Each of the six productions is, in fact,
offering new angles of insight into this familiar script.
That was certainly the case in Indianapolis, where IRT guest
director Amster delivered an enlightening exegesis of the play by
staging the first act in the framework of a rehearsal for the original
1938 production. Resurrecting Our Town’s bare stage, with footlights
down front and radiators lining the back wall, Amster’s production
began with the cast playing actors of the 1930s, dressed to perform
as Grover’s Corners characters and sitting at a large rehearsal table
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with scripts in hands, while the Stage Manager commented on the
topography of the town and the background of its inhabitants—which,
in the context of the rehearsal framework, took on new meaning as
dramaturgical source material.
Amster craftily molded moments throughout Act 1 that solidified the rehearsal concept. When Mr. Webb (boisterously played by
Charles Goad) arrived late to give his sociopolitical report on Grover’s
Corners, a wigless Mrs. Webb (Manon Halliburton) ran on stage
attempting to cover for her tardy co-actor. “He’ll be here in a minute,”
she stammered, “he just cut his hand while he was eatin’ an apple.”
This actual line of dialogue, usually uttered as a literal explanation,
here became a clumsy comic excuse—revealed a second later when a
toilet flushed offstage and the disheveled actor rushed on. At the end
of the first act, the Stage Manager (Robert Elliott) abruptly stopped
addressing the actors and turned his attention directly to the audience
for the first time, describing how Our Town was going to be included
in a time capsule. By breaking the fourth wall here rather than at the
beginning of the play Amster ignited the profundity of Wilder’s text
and made the trope of direct address powerful and immediate. For
the rest of the evening, the audience listened to the Stage Manager’s
words with new ears.
The rehearsal idiom honored Our Town’s Brechtian facets and
Wilder’s aversion to realism. The pulling away of a layer of fabrication from the theatrical act reinforced the audience’s awareness that
it was seeing a play, a symbolic representation of life, not life itself,
and helped to crystallize Wilder’s allegorical microcosm of human
existence. As a whole, Amster’s approach compelled audiences for
whom the play lay cobwebbed in memory to greet it as an entirely
different entity. “Audiences come with a certain nostalgia, but they
also come with a certain condescension,” says Amster. “I wanted to
see if I could find a way to make that empty space new again.”
Two River Theater Company’s Posner also strove to make audiences “hear it fresh.” His production featured bunraku-style puppets
in the roles of the supporting townspeople and a thirtysomething
AMERICANTHEATRE may/june08
t. charles erickson
Our Town, directed by Gregory Boyd at Hartford Stage in Connecticut.
Stage Manager, played by Doug Hara—whom Posner describes as
neither “anti–Stage Manager” (as he characterizes the late Spalding
Gray’s performance) nor the “Mr. Pepperidge Farm” characterization
that has sometimes diluted the impact of the role.
A dynamic seven-member cast worked as an ensemble to bring the
villagers to life through puppetry. Professor Willard, for example—
about three feet tall with a puff of wild white hair, wearing spectacles,
a pinstriped vest and bow tie—was agilely manipulated by Joe Binder
(who played George), while actor Stephen D’Ambrose (who doubled
as Dr. Gibbs) gave him the idiosyncratic voice of a pedantic man
enthused to hear his own thoughts out loud. Masterfully designed
by Aaron Cromie, each puppet had distinct features that animated its
character’s personality. Posner was able to use this ancient art form
to serve Wilder’s modern goal of freeing the stage from the shackles
of realism and to give the production, in Posner’s words, “a level of
theatricality that breaks it open so that people can invest it with their
own imaginations.” He adds that, after the performance, audience
“There is something about the
play that is so inherently
American,” reflects Hartford
Stage’s Michael Wilson,
“that we want to cling to it
because somehow we
feel like our innate goodness
is within it.”
members would often insist they saw the puppets’ mouths and faces
moving—“which, of course, they never did.”
The compelling imagery offered in the Two River production
drew the eerie undertones of the play’s final graveyard scene to the
surface, fully unveiling its pathos. Wooden hutches, representing
tombstones, loomed in a corner of the thrust stage overgrown with
grass. A stone-faced Mrs. Gibbs (Maureen Silliman) sat in front of
her tombstone, and in the foreground, Emily (Erin Weaver) was
dressed in her pristine wedding gown. The puppets, now sprawled
lifelessly in front of their tombstones or posed on the angled sides of
the hutches, no longer walked and talked as Emily does—with no one
animating them, they were empty husks, corporeal symbols for the
hopeful spirit that swiftly dwindles when one passes over to death.
The use of puppetry gave this scene an uncanny resonance.
Our Town also presents a tailor-made opportunity for building
stronger ties with a community. Now in his first season at Two River,
Posner used the play as a way to literally shake the hands of his new
neighbors. Before performances, actors in costume mingled with
the audience. Actual audience members (instead of cast members)
participated in the scene in which editor Webb takes questions from
the audience after his sociopolitical report. Our Town also launched
Two River’s 732 Project (named for Red Bank’s area code), a multiyear
folklore enterprise that will use interviews from members of the community as source material for a living history of the region.
Hartford and IRT also amplified their productions with outreach operations. Both had well-attended student matinees and
offered informational prologues and talkbacks. IRT initiated a new
program of community readings and discussions in libraries, parks
and community centers all over Indianapolis. “We really wanted to
explore the sense of ownership that people have of this play,” says
IRT artistic director Janet Allen.
Both Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Bill Rauch
and the Arden’s Nolan are looking to physical settings for an invigorated Our Town. In Ashland, it will be the first 20th-century (or, for
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may/june08 AMERICANTHEATRE
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welcome back to grover’s corners
that matter, American) play to be mounted
on OSF’s outdoor Elizabethan stage. “It’s the
right play to push the boundaries,” Rauch
says, “because, like Shakespeare, Wilder
put emphasis on the imaginative exchange
between audience and the actors.” Sitting
outdoors, amongst the rolling hills of the
Rouge Valley, audiences will have “a more
immediate connection to Wilder’s themes
of human isolation and connection and the
vastness of the universe,” Rauch believes.
The official title of the Arden production is Our Town in Old City—a reference
to the historical section of Philadelphia
marked by narrow streets of cobblestone and
historical monuments such as the Betsy Ross
house. Act 1 will take place at the Arden’s
theatre (which was once the grounds of Ben
Franklin’s bookshop); for the second act,
audiences will walk next door through the
churchyard (where Franklin is buried) into
the majesty of Christ Church, one of the
oldest sanctuaries in America (and where
the pew of George Washington is diligently
marked). Our Town in Old City will interweave
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con ti n u ed f ro m pag e 27
Philadelphia’s actual historical legacy with
events of the play, amplifying how its universal themes tangibly apply to the community
in all its diversity.
The Arden production will feature
the largest cast that the theatre has ever
employed, using the natural accents of the
actors. “I’m eager to have a wide range of
our community represented on stage,” says
Nolan. Local musical groups will be incorporated into each performance along with
special local guests (newscasters, teachers
and politicians). Governor Edward Rendell
is an honorary producer.
The Hypocrites, a thriving non-Equity
Chicago company known for offering alternative and sometimes explosive points of view,
was still, as of press time, in the creative
brainstorming phase of production. One
idea currently on the table, divulges artistic
director Sean Graney, is that director Cromer
may also take on the role of the ruminative
Stage Manager. “Stripping away some of the
pretension of the character,” asserts Graney,
“will endow the Stage Manager with a deeper
level of honesty.”
The desire to blow dust off the play and
resuscitate its shocking impact has led to
some radical stagings in the past few years.
A 2007 summer staging in Minneapolis by
Girl Friday Productions eradicated the role
of the Stage Manager completely, ascribing
his prophetic words to various members of
the cast. New York City’s Transport Group,
in 2002, cast a 12-year-old girl as the Stage
Manager while young lovers George and
Emily were played by actors in their sixties.
Going further back, the Wooster Group’s
famous and controversial 1981 deconstruction of the play, titled Route 1 & 9, threw
blackface and explicit sex into the mix.
By contrast, director Boyd’s laudable
bare-boned approach at Hartford Stage
attempted to celebrate the original intent
of the author by handling the text of the play
with reverence. “I think there’s a real purity
in this production,” the company’s artistic
director Michael Wilson says of the show,
which ran last September and October. “It
is daring for it to be purely what Thornton
AMERICAN THEATRE may/june08
Wilder wanted, which was actors, audience,
blank stage and these words.” More than anything, Boyd felt his job was scraping off the
coats of “Baskin-Robbins, Norman Rockwell
and Disney” that have been lacquered upon
the play over the years. His chief collaborator on the project was 82-year-old acting
legend Hal Holbrook, who has a history
with the play, having played the role of the
Stage Manager twice before (at Connecticut’s
Long Wharf Theatre in 1987 and 10 years
earlier in NBC’s televised version, which
earned him an Emmy nomination). Although
Holbrook became ill a couple of weeks into
the run, his contributions helped deliver an
authentic and austere Our Town, unscathed
by easy emotion or grandiosity.
Boyd and Holbrook were deeply in tune
with the play’s occasionally dire melancholy.
“If you ignore what lies in the depths of the
text,” the director emphasizes, “you betray
the play.” He likens its contradictory lesson
to the ancient Sanskrit text Mahabharata:
“We all know we’re going to die, yet we live
as if we’re not.” Holbrook’s age and gravitas
underscored how much the play revolves
around mortality and loss.
The darker elements of Our Town were
often lost during what Tappan Wilder calls
the “Leave It to Beaver” phase of the play’s
life (from the 1950s through the 1970s),
which earned it an undeserved reputation
for sentimental shallowness—epitomized
by Sinatra singing “Love and Marriage” in
the 1955 musical version.
But ‘Our Town’ was written at
a time when hope was actually a precious
commodity. The threat of war was building
in the far east while at home social unrest
and discord prompted by the Great Depression was still roiling. Dysphoric uneasiness,
self-doubt and longing riddled the country
even as Roosevelt’s New Deal seemed to
promise light at the end of the tunnel. Our
Town is set in a more tranquil time before the
war—a time Wilder describes in his novel
The Eighth Day when “every man, woman
and child believed he or she lived in the best
town in the best state in the best country in
the world. This conviction filled them with
a certain strength.” While summoning an
idealistic time made the universal aspects of
life more resonant and palpable, it also ended
up serving a pressing sociological need: It
helped satisfy members of the public’s desire
May/june08 AMERICANTHEATRE
for a simpler, more iconic America than the
one they perceived around them.
Today’s America can be said to be experiencing equally trying times: Since the turn
of the century a series of contentious elections
have called democracy itself into question,
and Americans have endured the tragedy
of 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan and
Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath,
the torture at Abu-Ghraib, the Patriot Act,
serious threats to civil liberties and free
speech, questionable expansion of presidential
authority and a polarizing split into “blue
and red” states. So in today’s discordant
America, do we not need again to be “filled
with a certain strength”?
A number of the artistic directors I
spoke to noted that the play’s ability to provide comfort in times of trouble was part of
the appeal of producing it this season. Wilder’s portrait of Grover’s Corners “reminds us
of what is eternal and good in the American
psyche and captures that indomitable spirit
of inquiry that even our polarized social
and political conditions cannot dampen or
deny,” says the IRT’s Janet Allen. “There is
something about the play that is so inherently
American,” reflects Wilson, “that we want
to cling to it because somehow we feel like
our innate goodness is within it.”
But it also yields insight into “who we
are and what we mean by ‘American’ and
‘American values,’” says Posner. Wilder’s
classic both extols and deeply criticizes the
substance of broadly accepted American
culture by exploring the nation’s issues with
isolationism, xenophobia, gender stereotyping and the tragic consequences of war. “The
trick is not to offer the play as a remedy,” says
Allen. “It suggests that nothing is wholly
good or bad. It doesn’t set forth any particular
course of action.” Rauch agrees: “In such
terrifying times, it is the play’s search for
meaning” that matters.
Many of these artists, like myself, first
met the play in their formative years of middle
or high school—and it was only as they grew
older that the play’s meaning became clearer
and its themes richer. “As they say with any
great art,” notes Wilson, “Our Town doesn’t
change; it’s us who change.”
Lori Ann Laster is a 2007–08
American Theatre Affiliated Writer,
with support by a grant from the
Jerome Foundation.
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